So while watching this podcast, I wondered if I should keep my reflection to myself or not. Then you answered that for me in the podcast: that students getting involved and interacting is something you really like. And I also know you said, as an online teacher, you never know what reaches the students, so here you go. Sorry it's a bit long, but two hours, Mawlana — I am summing up two hours of the most important reflections I think. I really enjoyed listening to this in so many aspects. One of the first like really reflections I made was about the clothing, and it made me think of Imam an-Nasa'i, raheemullah — I think it was him. He never dressed as the scholars of his time, and at one teacher he was not allowed in due to his clothes not looking like that of a student of knowledge. So he would stand by a wall and listen to the sheikh giving hadith. If I am not mistaken, we only know this sheikh through Imam an-Nasa'i in his Sunan. I guess clothes have just always been a part of it somehow. I wonder why. The whole thing with Egypt is just frightening, honestly. I didn't know the situation was so bad. Like, even when I ask anyone about these things, they all say those are fake news or propaganda. So I had come to think so too. Because no Egyptian is going to tell you this, so I had to ask secondary sources, right, because I have sisters in Egypt, I know. I never would have known this from them. I won't even start on the whole isnad thing. Because as a student who dream of becoming a muhadithah and specialise in the isnad, I share the frustation 100% Last thing I thought about is how important Aqeedah is, but not just that — to understand what it actually means. When I became a Muslim, I learned about fiqh very fast. All the flaws I had were pointed out quite fast, only two weeks into Islam. I had been a Muslim for over a year when I was invited to attend education in my local masjid and heard the word 'Tawheed' — I kid you not, no one had taught me this word. When I asked sisters what Aqeedah meant before entering this course, this would be what I was told: 'It is our belief in Allah.' OK, yes, I understand — can you be more concrete? 'Where is Allah?' 'He is above His Kursi.' 'Good, that is your Aqeedah.' Me be like ..........

Assalamu alaykum wa rahmatullah. Every ROOTED guest carries a story: where they learned, who taught them, and what they would tell us now. We have started writing those stories down. FRUITS is a short read that follows each episode: the guest's journey, five insights from the conversation, and lessons to carry home. The first two are up, with Mawlana Ibrahim Gaffoor and Mawlana Saalim Peck. Read them here: https://isnadacademy.com/fruits/ If you would like each new one in your inbox, join the Isnad Academy mailing list. One email after each episode, and when you sign up you receive Return to Salah, my nine-part audio series on finding your way back to prayer, free: https://isnadacademy.com/fruits/#fr-signup ROOTED Episode 13 goes out this Friday, insha Allah, with Shaykh Nazeer Majiet, and its FRUITS will follow. Barakallahu feekum. Irshaad

Assalamu alaykum wa rahmatullah. ROOTED has kept going, and some of these went out inside an earlier post, so here they all are in one place. Four episodes have gone up since Mawlana Zakariyya Harnekar, and there is a fifth conversation outside the series I want you to see. All of them are free. Ep. 6 — He Knew Every Hafiz in Cape Town | Imam Fuad Samaai https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_l4v97tfTEQ Ep. 7 — “You Don’t Worship the Teacher” | Mawlana Zakariyah Philander The man at the front of the first madrasa I ever sat in, in Retreat, when I was eleven. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p84vZFLZ9C8 Ep. 8 — One of the Shortest Chains to Sahih al-Bukhari in the World | Mawlana Ashraf Lamara https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oKOMp9SZsFA Ep. 9 — Damascus, Through the Door of Du’a | Shaykhah Ruqayyah Samsodien She flew to Damascus at eighteen and hung a sign around her neck that read “I don’t speak English,” so that nobody would. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3cuFJE4f6HQ And the beginning of something separate: A Child of the Jamaat, the first of my long conversations with Prof. Farid Esack on being a Muslim in South Africa. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yUwcDETGtqA The whole ROOTED playlist is here: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLf_aPJtuAk9c I leave for Umrah on Tuesday in sha Allah and will be back on 5 October. Watch one of these while I am away and put whatever it raises in Ask the Shaykh — I will work through them on my return. Keep me and my family in your duas. Barakallahu feekum.

Assalamu alaykum wa rahmatullah. The twelfth of Rabi al-Awwal is upon us, and with it the argument that comes around every year. I am putting something here in place of that argument. Some years ago my teacher, Mawlana Muhammad Taha Karaan (Allah have mercy on him), spoke on the Mawlid at a meeting of scholars at the Muslim Judicial Council. He was addressing ulama, and he spoke the way scholars speak to one another: half the sentences in Arabic, books named without explanation, the argument moving at the speed of a room that already knows the material. Anyone listening from outside that room would catch the tone and miss the substance. I have taken that recording and made it readable. I arranged the fragments into prose, gave the English for every Arabic term he used, identified each scholar and book he named in shorthand, and added footnotes where a reader would need one. The main text is his — his reasoning, his order, his conclusion. The footnotes are mine, and so is any error in them. What he does with the question is not what you expect. He could not find a single Shafi’i jurist who condemns the Mawlid itself, and he shows you why: the author of the school’s standard book against innovation is the same man who calls the Prophetic Mawlid among the finest things introduced in his time. He shows you that the earliest Mawlids were works of Prophetic biography — six and seven volumes of hadith and history — and that one of the largest of them was written by the scholar who wrote in defence of Ibn Taymiyya. Then he turns and cuts the other way. The standing at the mention of the birth, he says, is a separate legal question, and on it he sides with Ibn Hajar al-Haytami, who called it a grave and objectionable innovation. He says this plainly, in a room where many would have preferred otherwise. And he says that once a good thing hardens into a ritual, and the ritual into an obligation — you did not stand, therefore you do not love him — the very jurist who permitted it would be the first to object.